I, personnaly, don't think that soulbound items are the way to go to get Permadeath included in a (M)MORPG. The Family Ties is more like it, in my opinion.

Let me outsketch it.

The main trouble most people seem to have with Permadeath is "I don't want to know I have wasted time on a character, just to have it removed after I lost it". In my opinion, the best solution is to let the character know for a fact that the character is going to die ANYWAY.

Let's have the characters ageing, and dieing naturally after, say, two months real time. You may notice visual changes on them, like suggested in the other thread, giving clues about your age, maybe have scars, or hair whiteing, or a limp appearing, or anything, if the character comes too close to Age Death.


Then, if you know for a fact that your character is going to die, why bother playing at all?

Because, as in many other online games, this game is all about gaining power over the rest of the players. In this respect, I don't think it is a good enough incentive, but some people just love to brag about something, even a virtual achievement. Therefore, you must be assured that you will have som character to keep playing with. So here comes the meat of the core Permadeath mechanic: Breeding

Breeding is a way to keep what you would call clones in EvE. They are offsprings of yourself and (that is important) of another character of opposite sex. They retain a variable portion of each of the parents' maximum stats at the conception moment, and are fully playable after, say, two weeks. In the meantime, you have to care for them, a la Sims, maybe, by bringing to your Family Estate( another important piece here) food, clothing to your growing child, or anything else. For the last four days before you can take over as your own child, you can TRAIN him to a future career, either by finding him a master (another player preferably, or an NPC if need be) which will give him basic skills, or by mastering him yourself. A Master is required to care for the pupil, as it is someone else's life he is protecting. The master shall give the pupil food, clothing, and if the context requires it, weapons, or train him into building his own.

The Family Estate is where your leftover characters are and work while you're not playing them and they are alive. Reasonnably, the ageing characters should go away from home after some time to become NPCs and be able to get married by anyone willing to. This is also a place in which you can store some of your "loot" (but I prefer the term findings), and where you can rest your characters without any threat on them. Being there also allows you to switch between your different family members characters, and play for a while the merchant uncle, before going back to the adventuring father. Maybe buying dogs could give a boost against burglary and to morale as well...

Ideally, this whole Family Estate system would trigger two things.

The first one would be Factions war, which would require a massive raid on a town, and the abduction of children as either slaves to the hometown, or as unnatural offsprings, that is save characters, or "lives", if you must put it this way.

The second would be a continuous creation of "Neighbourhood quests", like "Grandpa has been drinking and fighting at the inn. Go and pay for the disaster, and then find something to heal Mister Hopkinson.", or maybe "The dog has wandered again. Go find him". The reason for such a quest system could be the discrete inclusion of bigger neighbouring ongoing quests which would definitely give a "lived in" feeling to the world. "This is the fifteenth person going missing in the neighbourhood this week. A fifteenth male. Something is happening to them after they've gone to the pub, and this is hurting the commerce. Explore this and try to bring them back if possible." Tis could be a possible avenue of questing. Even more so if it happened that the males in question had been meeting in some secret lair to prepare a line of defense against some dark and mysterious danger, like, maybe, a potential invasion, or even worse, someone had convinced them an invasion was pending, and collected their treasure to arm them (understand con them...).



Moreover, if there were many leftover characters, it would mean more NPCs. If they were males, this would mean more guards and/or merchants in an area. But this can only happen if there is enough food (crops, cereals and veggies) being grown in the surroundings. Maybe a balancing mechanic can be devised to maintain a reasonnable balance between the food providers and the profit shearers. And this could, in turn, be made into an auto-regulating system which would balance the number of guards in any area, and possibly, the number of THIEFS in any area.



As a conclusion, I can onhly say that the only reason I can think of for putting Permadeath at the center of a game would be WAR, and that dieing as a soldier would be a great loss both to the character but to the nation as well. But sometimes, accomplishing feats of stupid bravery could grant your family some benefit, and thus to the player as well...

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Original Post by Dunam said:

But who cares for the kids?

Well, I would have thought it would be fairly obvious. YOU care for your own.

Let's assume, for the sake of the holistic design we're having here, that it needs a male character and a female character to have children, and that the parents CANNOT belong to the same player, or at least to the same account, because the creation of the offsprings require a sort of "trade" between both characters, to activate the instant creation of the offsprings.

If the second parent is an NPC, then it is automated, and the creation happens whenever the playing parent says so. One offspring is created.

If the second parent is a PC, then a change occurs. TWO offsprings are created, of random gender, and are randomly attributed to the parents. This way, even if the "soulmating" becomes a trade of its own, because I can only assume that there will ALWAYS be players who will try to make a little extra cash from those games and will sell their own offsprings from mating time, since the attribution is random, then there is always a chance that one of two parents will get nothing in return. Let's say there is a 50% chance that you get one child, 25% that you get two, and 25% that you get none, or something like that.

And who REALLY cares for them while they're only infants? Well, the rest of your family, if you're wealthy(old) enough to have one, maybe your guild's babysitter, if your guild has one.

After being infants, your offsprings (or back-up lifes) become children, and are randomly assigned character traits from a pool in which the parents' own traits are presented thrice at least, so that the child DO have a fair chance of resembling the parents in some way, and they more or less evolve on their own, in the streets, maybe, before they can be adressed to trademasters.

Then, we assume that your back-up lifes are teenagers, and that they ar eold enough to learn a career, and are therefore to be teamed with a tradesmaster that will "teach" them some of his skills. I imagine the system to be a sort of passive XP regular system, in which the apprentice learns both from his master's successes, and from his own failures. This way, your next character may get higher skills from simply watching a master crafter doing what he does than from randomly trying to patch things together. But there will be a limit to how long the training sessions can last, and they will be left to be after they become "of age", and are left on their own.

From that moment, depending on where they are on your world's map, and where their family estate is, they will want to go back there (another additional mission generator: bring me back there and I will do something for you) and when back at home, they will start working on your behalf. There should probably be a limit to how many characters you can play at a time, and how many you can care for. Maybe this limit could be related to how long you've played the game, or maybe it is only related to something else, like prestige or personnal wealth. Should be dug…